Apple Will Replace Your Lousy iPhone 5S Battery

The company has acknowledged a manufacturing issue that is affecting an untold number of new iPhones.

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The new, top-of-the-line Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 5S is supposed to get up to 10 hours of battery life, and for most users, the phone delivers. However, some users have noticed their battery draining much faster than that (see some complaints about the 5S's battery life here).

Yesterday, Apple officially acknowledged that a select few new iPhones have a technical glitch that limits battery life. Teresa Brewer, an Apple spokesperson, told the New York Times, "We recently discovered a manufacturing issue affecting a very limited number of iPhone 5S devices that could cause the battery to take longer to charge or result in reduced battery life. We are reaching out to customers with affected phones and will provide them with a replacement phone."

The exact number of affected phones is not certain, but the New York Times reported that Brewer implied that it was "a few thousand phones."

This is not the first time Apple has dealt with defective batteries: In 2006, Apple issued a recall for some of its MacBooks because their batteries contained malfunctioning cells, made by Sony (NYSE:SNE), that were causing the computers to explode.